


hang my hopes out on the line

by TardisIsTheOnlyWayToTravel



Series: T-2000 series [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991), The Terminator (1984), Thor (2011)
Genre: Alternate Future, Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Crossover, F/M, Terminator Darcy Lewis, Terminators, ignores Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-28
Updated: 2014-07-28
Packaged: 2018-02-10 18:58:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2036358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TardisIsTheOnlyWayToTravel/pseuds/TardisIsTheOnlyWayToTravel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“So how do you even exist, if we destroyed Skynet?” John asked.</p>
            </blockquote>





	hang my hopes out on the line

**Author's Note:**

> _Takes place after 'Avoiding Obsolescence.' Takes place later that day._

“So how do you even exist, if we destroyed Skynet?” John asked.

He and Darcy were sitting in the SHIELD cafeteria, at a table by themselves, while John drank coffee and Darcy ‘drank’ from a can of Coca-Cola.

Darcy scanned the room to see if anyone – or any listening device – was in range. Nothing and no one was.

She shrugged.

“While I was developed quite a while after the T-1000 was sent back to kill you, the point in time that I actually _arrived_ at was only a day or so after the T-1000 arrived back in time. I figure that whatever you did to end Skynet, it must have happened shortly after I arrived back in time. I was able to follow your trail to the steel mill – between you guys and the T-1000, you left a pretty obvious trail of destruction behind you – but after that you just disappeared. I spent three years looking for you before I finally gave up. By then I’d learned enough to be capable of altering my objectives.”

“Yeah, I was wondering about that.” John leaned back in his chair, tipping it back so that it rested on the back two legs, balanced precariously. Darcy calculated a 47% chance that he would overbalance and he and the chair would end up in a heap on the floor. “The guy who saved me, whatever model he was, his learning switch was set to ‘off.’ He said that Skynet doesn’t like you thinking for yourself when you’re sent out alone. Why are you different?”

Darcy leaned forwards, arranging her expression into a conspiratorial smile.

“Well, after the T-1000 was sent back and you didn’t mysteriously vanish from the timeline, Skynet figured that the T-1000 must have failed its mission. Given that physically speaking, the T-1000 was superior in pretty much every way, Skynet concluded that it must have been a lack of, like, mental flexibility that stopped the T-1000 from succeeding. So, the next time they sent a Terminator back, they made sure it was capable of learning and adapting. Thus, a Terminator capable of eventually changing its objectives, since they weren’t set to, you know, ‘read-only.’”

Darcy took a sip of her coke. John watched in fascination.

“How do you – where does that even go?” he asked, gesturing at the Coca-Cola can.

“Whatever can be broken down into useable form is, and I eject the residues later,” Darcy explained. “Kinda like humans do, only the process is different, obviously.”

“Obviously,” John echoed. “That’s handy.”

“So what have you done with your life, besides SHIELD?” Darcy asked, leaning forward. “Do you have a girlfriend? Friends? Hobbies?”

John glanced down, a crooked smile curving his lips, before glancing back up to meet Darcy’s eyes.

“I have friends, I guess. I don’t know. I mean, probably anyone else would call them friends, but… they don’t know who I am, or why I’m the way I am, which makes it hard, you know? There’s no one who knows all of me. It’s not like I can tell them I grew up knowing I might be the leader of the Human Resistance one day. They’d think I was a computer geek with delusions of grandeur, or something. And no, I don’t have a girlfriend,” he added. “The ‘bad boy’ thing stops working after a certain age, and anyway, when all you do is work with computers for a living, people assume you’re just trying too hard.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Darcy gave him a grin she knew to be ‘flirtatious’ in nature. “Seems to be working pretty well to me.”

John threw back his head and laughed.

“Holy shit, are you flirting with me? You are!” He laughed again. “God, this is priceless. A Terminator is flirting with me. That’s got to be a first.”

Darcy leaned over to poke him in the arm reprovingly.

“Please, like I haven’t been living like a human for the last eighteen years. You think I’ve never dated anyone before? Sure, they thought I was kind of crazy, but it was the endearing sort of crazy.”

“You’ve _dated?_ ” John exclaimed. He didn’t seem able to stop laughing. Darcy wondered why he was reacting with such a strong amusement response. “That’s great.”

“Yes, I’ve dated, the longest relationship I’ve ever had was two years, but then the asshole broke up with me because his ex-girlfriend got in touch,” Darcy said.

“But why?” John spread his hands. “Was it just to keep your cover, or were you curious, or what?” His expression was animated and entertained.

“Well, the first two times it was a mixture of both,” Darcy admitted. “Later, though, I grew kind of fond of the people I was dating. Probably nothing like what a human feels, I know, but there was an emotional attachment.”

“So you _do_ have emotions.” John looked smug. “I figured.”

“How did you know?” Darcy asked.

“Experience,” John promptly supplied. “The Terminator that protected me when I was a kid, we switched his ability to learn on–”

“He _let_ you?” Darcy exclaimed, flattening protective hands over her torso, where her CPU was. John’s gaze followed the movement, before his eyes flicked up again to meet Darcy’s.

“He recognised that it would be to our advantage if he could learn things,” said John impatiently. “But my point is, he was able to learn for like a day, but even just in that time he picked up a few things. For you, after eighteen _years?_ You’ve got to have emotions.”

Darcy scanned John’s expression, and identified it as ‘triumphant.’ She snorted.

“Okay, yes, I have feelings, and they’ve been given eighteen years to develop. Well done. Anyway, we were talking about you, and you were failing to answer my question about hobbies.”

John shrugged.

“I still hack things sometimes, and now and then I practice at SHIELD’s shooting range, just so I don’t get rusty. I ride my bike a lot, and I like some of those MMORPGs, like _World of Warcraft_ is okay. Honestly, most of my life is spent here, working.” He let out a loud huff of breath. “I make a pretty boring future leader of mankind, right?”

“You work in a top-security base on a classified project based around interstellar travel, for a covert organisation,” Darcy pointed out flatly. “I think your sense of ‘boring’ is skewed.”

John flashed Darcy a cocky grin.

“Probably. It’s not like I ever had a normal life.”

Darcy identified the sound of approaching footsteps, heading towards their table. She turned away from John to look in that direction, and saw an agent in a SHIELD tactical suit walking towards them.

John looked over as well, following Darcy’s gaze, and the two of them waited in silence as the agent approached.

The agent’s eyes flickered to Darcy’s security pass as Darcy scanned him from head to toe, including his own security pass.

“Miss Lewis?” the agent asked politely. “Director Fury wants to see you.”

John cackled.

“Someone’s in trouble,” he said in a sing-song voice, only laughing even more when Darcy socked him gently in the arm, monitoring the degree of impact so that it caused neither pain nor injury. “Have fun in the principal’s office.”

“Shut up,” Darcy told him, before she stood and met the agent’s gaze. “Um, I’m really new here, so do you mind showing me where I should go?”

“Sure, just follow me,” said the agent, and turned and started walking back through the cafeteria.

Darcy glanced back to see John smirking at her. She gave him the finger as she walked away, which only made John break into a grin.

Darcy shook her head, and decided yet again that she liked John.

* * *

Darcy stood in front of the desk. The man standing at the window with his back to her had a body type and skin tone consistent with her file on Nicholas Fury, but until Darcy got a chance to scan his face, Darcy couldn’t identify him for certain.

“Take a seat.” The man’s voice was resonant and commanding.

Darcy took a seat, as she had no reason not to. Her gaze scanned the office, identifying every piece of technology in the room, even the secret door set into the right wall.

The man finally turned, and Darcy scanned his features, identifying him as Nicholas Fury. Nicholas Fury had been a senior agent of SHIELD when Skynet had taken over, in the original timeline.

“Director Fury,” Darcy said in an easy tone. “What can I do for you?” She adjusted her posture to appear as unthreatening as possible.

Fury’s single eye stared at her in a way that would be considered intimidating by humans. Darcy gazed calmly back, never wavering or blinking. Finally Fury blinked, and glanced momentarily away. He stepped forward, and took a seat at his desk.

He went back to staring at Darcy.

“So. Apparently you’re a killing-machine from the future,” he said.

“An alternative future,” Darcy corrected quickly. “That timeline no longer holds potentiality. It was made void in 1994 when Skynet’s existence was destroyed before it reached self-awareness.”

“Skynet,” said Fury, still watching Darcy intently. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s the sentient computer that wanted to wipe humanity off the planet, right?”

“Right,” Darcy agreed.

“And you were one of humanity’s exterminators. Now here you sit, in my office. How am I meant to take that?” Fury asked rhetorically, leaning his elbows on his desk.

“As a positive sign?” Darcy suggested. “Like, you could be dead by now, but you’re not.” She leaned back in her chair. “I might be a Terminator, but I haven’t performed any terminations in fifteen years. My objective is to be part of human society, not to destroy it. My main concern is my own survival. As long as you’re not a threat to me, I’m not a threat to you, either.”

“So you say.” Fury’s expression didn’t change. Darcy sighed, and sat forward.

“I just spent twenty minutes sitting with the leader of the Human Resistance in the cafeteria while he drank coffee. Trust me, if I were hostile in any way, he would have been the first casualty. I understand your caution, but don’t go overboard. I’m only as much as a threat as you make me.”

Fury just continued to study Darcy.

“You’ve been under surveillance for some time,” he said abruptly. Darcy knew this already: she was fully capable of detecting the humans who had been assigned to follow her, as well as the listening the devices they used. “At no point did anyone suspect that you were anything other than human. This concerns me.”

“I’ve had a long time to perfect the art of blending in,” said Darcy, and displayed a smile. “Besides, I’m too hot to be a cybernetic organism.”

“A what?” Fury frowned.

“Cybernetic organism. Basically, a sentient machine,” Darcy translated. “Look, I don’t want any trouble, okay? I just want to keep working with Jane and John, doing my thing, like I always do. Can you work with that?”

Fury gave her a long look.

“I’ll be informing certain senior agents of your capabilities,” he said slowly. “We’ll be watching you closely, Miss Lewis. But as long as you toe the line, we don’t have a problem.”

Darcy scanned Fury’s expression, but it seemed sincere.

“Awesome.” She offered him a smile. “Can I get back to work, now?”

“Go,” said Fury.

 Darcy got to her feet, halting on her way to the door as Fury said one more thing.

“But understand one thing, Miss Lewis. If you ever cross the line – if you behave in any way that we identify as a threat – we will use every resource we have against you. You can count on it.”

Darcy turned back to Fury, and smirked in a way that she knew humans identified as ‘unsettling’.

“I’ll bear that in mind, Director.”

Turning back to the door, Darcy exited the office without looking back.

 


End file.
